No, of course not, they protect and serve us, putting their own lives on the line daily
No, they merely enforce the law of the land
No, as criminals get bigger and more dangerous weapons, we need the police to keep up
No, the better armed my local police are, the better they can protect us
Their military-style SWAT teams are scary, but overall, I trust them
I wouldn’t say I “fear” them, but I do share concerns they’re too militarized
Yes, when SWAT teams are called in to enforce silly things like raw-milk laws, you bet we have cause to fear
Yes, the militarization of local cops is way over the top
Yes, I used to get a nice feeling hearing the word “police.” Now I quake in abject fear
Yes, sadly, America has become Police State, USA
Yes, we’re seeing an America where brownshirts aren’t just a possibility, but a reality
Yes, and I’m sure they’re more than happy to do Obama’s bidding
Other

And here are the answers (so far):

Yes, when SWAT teams are called in to enforce silly things like raw-milk laws, you bet we have cause to fear (22%, 117 Votes)

Yes, we’re seeing an America where brownshirts aren’t just a possibility, but a reality (22%, 117 Votes)

James Corbett interviewed Larken Rose recently, who talks about “the most dangerous superstition,” that of statism. Rose explains quite clearly how so many people believe in the god called government, but whose beliefs are so instilled into them and reinforced by society’s government-worship authoritarianism that they are utterly blind to just how evil and destructive the institution is that they blindly worship.

Another close associate of Corbett’s, Sibel Edmonds, has this humorous yet insightful post on the difficulty in labeling her “conservative” or “liberal,” “libertarian,” “socialist,” etc.

Well, Edmonds doesn’t want to be labeled. But I don’t mind being labeled a “voluntaryist,” because I believe that all associations, relationships, and contracts must be voluntary in order to be considered honest, just, civilized, and moral. (I also don’t mind being labeled an “individualist,” and an adherent to the non-aggression principle.)

However, if you believe that some associations, relationships, and contracts can be coerced or compelled, then you accept immorality and uncivilized behavior. That is your choice. There is no in between.

Speaking of choice, Rad Geek has this compelling post on the immigration issue, in which he states it is your choice to believe in individual liberty and “freedom from arbitrary political restriction” or be a “nationalist and a bordercrat.” The two things are mutually exclusive.

Rad Geek refers to this post from “Personal Liberty Digest,” which is a website I have linked to quite often. The writer of that other post is a “Ben Bullard,” so I am not sure whether Bullard’s views totally reflect those of the website’s owner, Bob Livingston. However, it seems to me that Rad Geek is really responding mostly to the lunatics in the comments section.

But in the Knapp post, Stephan Kinsella weighs in in the comments with a quote from Hoppe’s aforementioned book: “Abolishing forced integration requires the de-democratization of society and ultimately the abolition of democracy. More specifically, the power to admit or exclude should be stripped from the hands of the central government and reassigned to the states, provinces, cities, towns, villages, residential districts, and ultimately to private property owners and their voluntary associations.”

But we can immediately restore the right of inclusion or exclusion to individuals and property owners if the people really believed in the right of freedom of association and the right of each individual to one’s own sovereignty as an individual. That means that each individual has a right to associate with or establish voluntary contracts with whomever one wants, and allow anyone one wants into one’s own privately-owned business, home, or otherwise private property, regardless of where the others came from, and it’s no one else’s business, not government bureaucrats, not your neighbors, the community, no one!

And that’s the choice: either you own your life, or the rest of the community and/or the State owns you. Nothing in between. It’s either/or. It’s your choice.

By the way, Rad Geek is really Charles Johnson, whose book (coedited with Gary Chartier), Markets Not Capitalism, distinguishes between the State-enforced redistributive privileges of capitalism and the freedom of freed markets (with which my comments above coincide).

I really like it when people clarify the issues of the day and the terms that people use in discussing the issues. I like truth tellers. For example, those who act as courageous whistleblowers and who expose the immoralities and wrongdoings of others and tell the truth about what’s really going on. For example, besides Edward Snowden and Bradley Manning, the aforementioned Sibel Edmonds was an FBI translator who saw wrongdoing and who knew the FBI had information prior to 9/11 and she spoke up about it. Here’s her book on the subject, titled, Classified Woman. (159 5-stars out of 173 reviews — not bad at all.)

The real truth-tellers of our time are in total contrast to the propagandists who tell lies and aid and abet the crimes of others through deception and dishonesty. The propagandists are mainly those who defend the State and its crimes. The State needs propaganda to continue it charades and its shams. Have you heard people telling lies and using deception and distortion to defend liberty? I doubt it.

That is why the government lied about the Bin Laden raid, as well as the Navy SEAL Chinook helicopter crash I referenced yesterday. Just as how the government lied about Pat Tillman, as well as the reasons for war in Afghanistan and Iraq. And that is why local police and firefighters told news media to shut up about the Michael Hastings car crash, and the list is never-ending.

And Jacob Hornberger has this recent post on why so much authoritarian State-worshiping outrage at Snowden and Manning, but not at all the same outrage at Lee Harvey Oswald in 1963 or after, and Hornberger explains why that might be.

Other truth-telling articles recently include this one from Infowars on the “Child Protective Services” (sic) scams throughout America. it’s a racket, just as everything else government-related.

And yesterday I mentioned the threats by “lawmakers” and/or the FDA against our health freedom in their wanting to require prescriptions for vitamins and nutritional supplements — well, now we hear about how the Eric Holster DOJ wants to strengthen the so-called “Computer Fraud and Abuse Act,” which essentially would make felons out of everyone innocently use their work and home computers. Is there any way to have a Government Fraud and Abuse Act? They’re nothing BUT frauds and abusers!

Speaking of the truth-tellers vs. the propagandists, and this goes well with the interview of Larken Rose at the top, Butler Shaffer had this great post on the LewRockwell.com Blog:

I am so weary of that gaggle of the intellectually and morally bankrupt who believes that they are uttering something profound when, in discussing Ed Snowden’s plight, recite the statist mantra: “just come home and face the music, Ed; don’t run away like a coward; come back to America and state your case.” This is no more than a cowardly evasion on their part; an unwillingness to stand in defense of a courageous man who did what they are too fainthearted to ever think of doing: challenging the playground bully. At a time when the American state insists upon knowing every conceivable detail of everyone’s lives, men like Snowden, Bradley Manning, Julian Assange, and other whistle-blowers, are condemned by the statist grovelers for informing the public of the state’s secrets.

I wonder if these politicians and media babblers would have equally condemned the likes of Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein, Ludwig von Mises, Karl Popper, Max Born, Thomas Mann, et al., for leaving Nazi Germany and going to other countries. “Come on, Albert, just go back to Hitler and state your case; it’s all ‘relative’ anyway, isn’t it?” Would they also have heaped praise on the neighbors who squealed to the Gestapo where Anne Frank’s family was hiding?

In the news recently have been many thoroughly depressing and annoying events and developments. Is there any good news? No, not really. Some people seem to think that the birth of yet another “royal baby” is “good news,” but no, it isn’t. I wonder if this little one will grow up to have big ears and a wish to be someone’s ‘tampon” like his goofy grandfather. Whatever.

Are the federal criminals, gangsters and ignoramuses really going to ban nutritional supplements? Like vitamins and so on? Are they really going to require that you get a prescription for these things? (F them, I say. I’m not going to have to see a $%@(&^$# doctor just to get my nutritional supplements!) It’s one thing after another now. These tyrants there in DC are really unbelievable.

And after all the spying scandals out there, now the federal goons want to force Internet providers to give the government their customers’ passwords to their accounts. “Well, there might be a terrorist out there somewhere, amongst tens of millions of people, so we HAVE to do this.” Actually, in my view the real reason they need innocent people’s passwords is because there are political dissidents and critics of the government out there. So the goons who don’t like their own criminality being exposed and publicized will dig into those people’s Internet accounts in order to falsely frame them in things they had nothing to do with, via sending messages etc presumably originating from the unsuspecting, hapless innocents’ email accounts. This is how criminal government goons behave, in my opinion.

It is too bad that so many millions of Americans were gullible enough to believe the Bush-Cheney bureaucrats that it was necessary to repeal the Bill of Rights in order to protect us from terrorists. Obviously, the people didn’t think very clearly about how to protect themselves from criminal government goons who will abuse their legalized encroachments and invasions.

And then we hear about very suspicious aspects associated with the shooting down of the Chinook helicopter that killed several Navy SEALs, some of whom were involved in the so-called Bin Laden raid.

Tom Mullen writes about Gov. Chris Christie who emotionalizes and rationalizes the feds’ criminal intrusions against innocent people with references to 9/11. Perhaps instead of stomach surgery Christie should have had brain surgery (if, indeed, he actually has a brain in there. Maybe he ate it, who knows.) If you look at his Wikipedia page, there are reminders of what a corrupt, criminal prosecutor he was and what an ignoramus of a governor he still is. He actually signed this bill into law. (And he probably read it first, too.)

Paul Craig Roberts describes how the U.S. became the USSR. In my view, it’s thanks to FDR, Johnson-Nixon, comrades Oliver North and Dick Cheney, and the Communist-in-Chief, Obomber. Robert Wenzel examined Obomber’s anti-free market speech recently. The useful idiots who are helping to bring on Total State control over the people and everyday life are not just the Occupy crowd or clueless progressives, but the conservatives and others who cheered on Bush-Cheney in their escalating the police state and the welfare state as well, putting things in place for the tyrant Obama to use against the people.

My main purpose with my writing and this blog has been to try to convince people that real freedom is what we need in a society for it to be remain as civilized as possible, and thus safe to live in, and prosper.

Without freedom, the society in general becomes less civilized, and less prosperous. And by freedom I mean the freedom from the aggression of others. And that includes the State. Too many people do not seem to see the relationship between the State and aggression.

But over the past year it has been frustrating to write these things, given that so many people have been raised to love the State. They love their government, no matter how bad it is, no matter how evil it is or how criminal its acts are toward the people.

And many people seem to have the mistaken belief that an institution of monopoly and compulsion over others – the State – can possibly secure or protect that freedom. It just doesn’t work. It can’t work. You can’t have “law,” and say that the State is “The Law.”

And you can’t employ some people and give them some official authority over others, non-consensually, and say that those State-employed authorities are “the law.” It just doesn’t work. But that is what we have now, and that is why the ones on the side of the State so easily commit criminal acts against innocent people, and get away with it with impunity. The system of monopoly and compulsion over others is inherently set up to do that.

But it really is difficult to convince people of the reality of what the State is. While it is frustrating, I must say that at times I read something that is inspiring, such as Lew Rockwell’s recent article on the Libertarian Paradox. He quotes Murray Rothbard especially regarding how the “intellectuals” of our time align themselves with the State (rather than with the truth). And Lew Rockwell points out some more truths when he asks:

What if the free market, the most extraordinary creator of wealth and innovation ever known, and the most reliable and efficient allocation mechanism of scarce resources, is also better at producing the goods for which we have been told we must rely on government? And what if the state, the greatest mass-murderer in history, the great drag on economic progress, and the institution that pits us against each other in a zero-sum game of mutual plunder, is retarding rather than advancing human welfare?

The people really need to overcome their denial of the criminal racket that is the State. It’s everywhere, it’s in-your-face now. One thing after another, day after day with the police, local and state government bureaucrats, federal kleptocrats and spies criminally invading and trespassing into the private lives of their own innocent neighbors.

But I will keep up with my efforts. Perhaps I should reduce my sarcasm and cynicism, though, my referring to people as “brainwashed sheeple” regardless how naïve and gullible so many people seem to be now. I don’t even talk to people that much anymore, like in the laundromat, out of fear that my opinions could be misinterpreted and thus I’d become the victim of an “If you see something, say something” brownshirt-stasi-parasite.

And already we have seen an increase in how the criminal State and its apparatchiks have been attempting to smear and silence those who expose the State’s true nature. Brandon Smith has this article up on just that, with examples such as the planting of false evidence to frame certain people, e.g. Oath Keepers, for things they have nothing to do with, simply because they believe that government officials who swore an oath to obey the Constitution must actually be loyal to their oaths.

But regarding the recent vote on Congressman Justin Amash’s amendment to defund the NSA’s fishing expeditions and criminal spying, Glenn Greenwald has this great analysis. Among other things, he notes how the true argument really is now:

What one sees in this debate is not Democrat v. Republican or left v. right. One sees authoritarianism v. individualism, fealty to The National Security State v. a belief in the need to constrain and check it, insider Washington loyalty v. outsider independence.

That’s why the only defenders of the NSA at this point are the decaying establishment leadership of both political parties whose allegiance is to the sprawling permanent power faction in Washington and the private industry that owns and controls it.

But all this increasing totalitarianism is the natural route that centralization of a society and a compulsory dependence on the centralized State will take.

Many people are willing to recognize the evils of the State and the criminal central planners, but they nevertheless remain faithful. It is difficult to convince people that to restore our freedom, the dismantling – not reforming – of the State is necessary. Or, at least the dismantling of the centralized government in DC.

In his lengthy and exhaustive essay on the Evil of the National-Security State, Jacob Hornberger refers to many events in history, particularly the JFK assassination, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Operation Northwoods, as well as references to Iran and Chile among other things.

While his past writings haven’t particularly favored the total dismantling of the entire State apparatus root and branch, Hornberger’s conclusion here is the right one: “The national-security state is a cancer on the body politic. It’s time to dismantle it.”

But how to persuade the millions of people amongst the population who believe their Rulers, who believe the State-stenographers in the mainstream media and the propagandists of the so-called “intelligentsia,” and who remain faithful despite the in-your-face crimes of the government and its enforcers?

In my own personal view, the State is a criminal racket, including all levels of it, from local city councils and local government police all the way up to each and every monopoly controlled by the federal government. To forcibly compel your neighbor to participate in your schemes in life is nothing but criminal. Libertarians, on the other hand, argue: “Live and let live.”

Also from LRC today: Laurence Vance asks if conservatives can be libertarians, using the same-sex marriage, abortion and drug use as examples. Judge Andrew Napolitano discusses Liberty and Safety. He states that liberty is the default position. In my own personal view, we do not need a government to “keep us safe.” With liberty and no restrictions on the right to self-defense, we have safety, and security. Don’t listen to the police-statists and gun-grabbers who suggest otherwise. And William Grigg has a post with yet another example why it’s not a good idea to call the police.

The New American has more on the dangerous ObamaCare data hub. In my view, Obama’s stated goal from several years ago was “single payer.” He wants conplete government contol over your medical matters and your personal life as well. They know that this whole scheme that the Pelosi Congress shoved down the people’s throats will be a total disaster, and that’s what they want, so the people will then beg for total government control. We need to go the other way, toward freedom!

The Huffington Post reports today that NSA director General Keith Alexander called an emergency Top Secret/SCI-level meeting on Capitol Hill to urge Members to vote against Rep. Justin Amash’s (R-MI) amendment to the Defense Appropriations bill which would end blanket collection authority under the Patriot Act and stop the NSA and other agencies “from using Section 215 of the Patriot Act to collect records, including telephone call records, that pertain to persons who are not subject to an investigation under Section 215.”

These behind closed doors sessions are usually designed to intimidate and strong-arm any wavering Members. As Rep. John Duncan (R-TN), a Ron Paul Institute Board Member, has recounted numerous times, administration and intelligence community officials use highly questionable tactics and bogus evidence at these secret briefings to browbeat Members into voting their way.

… as the Huffington Post article points out, “Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee with access to classified details about the program, said there is no evidence that the data collection had been directly responsible for stopping any single plot.” …

Robert Wenzel has this post showing how just about everything we do now requires that we report it to the government, have the government keep track of it, get government’s permission for it, or have to otherwise deal with government’s intrusions in some way.

In other words, we no longer have freedom in America.

And just who is the “government” with such authorities anyway? It is nothing but petty bureaucrats, professional politicians and lawyers, most of whom could never survive in a world without the force of an institutionalized State monopoly with the power to steal from the workers and producers and redistribute the loot.

But in my view, to restore such freedom (which was what America used to be known for, for crying out loud!), we cannot rely on state legislators, congressmen, city councilors, or otherwise “lawmakers.” The majority of them are drawn to the powers of government monopoly and force in order to feel important. And the rest of those who get into such a line of “work” may start with good intentions, even to repeal the intrusions, but end up not getting any such repeals through, or just become addicted to the power.

Therefore, one possibility is to reach the actual enforcers of such intrusions. I’ve tried to touch on that in the past. Is there any way to reach the actual government police to convince them of the actual immoral criminality of their enforcing such intrusions against the lives and property of private, peaceful people?

After all, if the government wants to say that something is a “crime,” then, as Laurence Vance asserted, there would need to be a victim. So, just about everything now that government says is “illegal” is NOT a crime, because these bureaucrats are mostly referring to peaceful behaviors.

People have a right to their freedom, and the right to be left alone in their persons and property, unless and until someone has actually aggressed against someone else’s person or property. It’s a basic, libertarian way of life that the early Americans understood. But modern Americans don’t really see that, because the government-seized education system indoctrinates the people to become good, unthinking, obedient little sheeple.

So when police are enforcing with physical violence and deprivation of life and liberty such non-crime “laws” against peaceful people, those police are the aggressors here, they are the ones who are acting criminally against peaceful, innocent people. Anthony Gregory recently addressed this point in the context of the gun control issue.

Can we possibly reach any government police and convince them to not enforce criminal fake-laws?

And one thing that has corrupted the whole system is the centralizing and bureaucratizing of “national security.” Such centralization has built up gradually since Herr Lincoln’s obsessive punishment of those who believe in self-determination.

More recently, when the Cold War ended, the power-addicted Rulers couldn’t even consider the actual dismantling of the national security-military-industrial complex which was no longer necessary at that time. That is why in 1991 then-defense Sec. Dick Cheney connived and schemed with then-President George H.W. Bush to start a new war of aggression, along with sanctions and no-fly zones to intentionally prevent the Iraqis from rebuilding their water and sewage treatment systems the U.S. military intentionally destroyed. The purpose of the war was to cause new provocations of foreigners, and continue such aggressions throughout the 1990s. Most Americans still don’t know or care about those things. But they do care about some stupid “royal baby” in the fascist U.K.

And now, thanks to Dick Cheney and the Elder President Bush (and Bush the Bedwetter who continued the wars of aggressions after 9/11 to further provoke foreigners), we have a War on Terror, in which the “War” is really a war on our freedom, and the real terrorists are those ^#%@%^ government bureaucrats!

As Washington’s Blog details, because of the “national security” warmongers and military-security contractor profiteers, we no longer have a functioning judicial system. And Bruce Schneier at the Atlantic explains how “everything is terrorism” now to the government.

Outside of the militarization of society and the usurping of our rights and the imprisonment of the entire population in the name of “keeping us safe,” we are also un-free now in other areas. Thankfully, there are many articles now on a daily basis which describe how less free we are now in all areas of daily life.

And, while I don’t always agree with Mr. Instapundit on everything, he does have a creative suggestion on curbing the government’s spying on you: the Third Amendment. However, just as they now refuse to recognize the Bill of Rights as containing any meaningful restrictions on all the government’s aforementioned intrusions and encroachments into people’s lives, liberty and property, the State-rubber-stamping courts will obviously not recognize the 3rd Amendment. Oh, well.

So Michael Rozeff’s solution at LewRockwell.com today is to “end the union” as it is a “failed State.” And I agree with that, as I have mentioned here many times before. (See this, this, this, and this, for examples.)

Anyway, Jacob Hornberger and Sheldon Richman of the Future of Freedom Foundation have this very thought-provoking discussion on the main differences between the freedom of libertarianism and the oppression and imprisonment of the conservatives’ and the Left’s statism.

Libertarian economic historian Thomas Woods has this excellent speech on Austrian Economics and libertarianism. The two are not the same thing, but they do go together well. It is definitely a case for freedom.

There have been a lot of questions regarding the Michael Hastings car crash and his alleged death. Some experts have suggested that Hastings’s Mercedes could have been set to be taken over via remote control. Given that there were no skid marks on the road and because of other questionable factors, such an explanation is quite plausible.

According to former U.S. government counter-terrorism official Richard Clarke, as reported by the Huffington Post, “it’s relatively easy to hack your way into the control system of a car, and to do such things as cause acceleration when the driver doesn’t want acceleration, to throw on the brakes when the driver doesn’t want the brakes on, to launch an air bag … You can do some really highly destructive things now, through hacking a car, and it’s not that hard.”

And an automotive expert claimed (via EPJ) that cars just don’t have massive fires as Hastings’s car did, which makes that huge car fire suspicious. And according to Infowars, Hastings’s body was not burned completely, only from the neck up, according to one witness. But there were no visible burns from the shoulders on down.

And why was a gag order placed on police and firefighters after the crash? Why were they told to not comment on the investigation? Why was his body cremated against his family’s wishes?

Well, I’m sure there were plenty of people who didn’t like Hastings and wanted to see him dead. He’s the investigative journalist who did this extensive report on Gen. Stanley McChrystal, which then led to McChrystal’s resignation amid much embarrassment. Hastings also did this report on the “runaway general,” Gen. William Caldwell, who ordered “special ops” soldiers to use psy-ops methods on visiting U.S. senators as a means to get them to vote for increased military funding.

Psy-ops are really supposed to be used on the “enemy,” which I put in quotes now because these days everyone is the enemy to the U.S. government.

There were even people in the media who had a disliking toward Hastings, as Glenn Greenwald shows in this article from 2011. Some of the media hacks really didn’t like Hastings’s work of actual journalism in his aforementioned articles, including John Burns of the New York Times, Lara Logan of CBS News, Norah O’Donnell then of MSNBC, and Julian Barnes of the War Street Journal, who were all quoted in that article by Greenwald. (Here is a list of many other articles by Greenwald showing the subservience to the U.S. government by news media hacks, so-called “journalists,” and their apparent symbiotic enmeshment with the State.)

But now it seems that when anyone reports honestly on what government bureaucrats, military and police are doing, on their corruption and crimes, the reporters and messengers of discomforting but truthful information are criticized and attacked as “unpatriotic” or “treasonous.” That is because we have such a population in decline now in which the majority (including professional journalists and academics) love and worship the State, and demonize anyone who is not subservient and obedient to its power and control.

So these days, if you say or write something critical of the government, you better watch out.

In this new article, CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou claims that “everyone is corrupt.” Well, he means, or I think he means that everyone in the CIA, the FBI and other government “defense”-related agencies. It’s like the local police in just about every city now. And all this is because of how centralized and bureaucratized everything is now.

The American sheeple have allowed all these federal, state and local governments to grow like crazy, doing nothing but consuming the earnings of the actual workers and producers of society. The sheeple have accepted and approved of one encroachment after another. And now the growth in all these government apparatus “to keep us safe” is making us less safe and less secure, because the main purpose of the entire apparatus in place now is for the State to have greater and greater power over the population, to suppress free expressions and dissent, and to totally kill the productive and entrepreneurial spirit which enabled the America of the early years to advance so quickly and raise the standard of living of the entire population higher than it had ever been.

As is often the case in political affairs, we have here a situation where governments reach their tentacles into the lives of the people under their control, and it is market forces from citizens and consumers which oppose and constrain this process.

The decline of civilization is because of the growth of government and bureaucracy and the centralization of power, and the growing dependence on the government for everything in life. If we do not begin to decentralize now, or soon, then America the current totalitarian banana republic really is heading for a disastrous end.

I wrote about Austrian economics recently. Here is an article from December of 2010 by Walter Block on the many Austrian school economists and writers who were the ones who predicted that there would be a housing bubble and economic crash, which then occurred in 2008 as we all know.

Government can do no good, and that includes government police. Non-State-monopolized police would have to follow the rule of law, and couldn’t be above the law. They would actually serve the consumers rather than beat them up and murder them for no good reason.

And James Bovard has another one on AmeriCorps and its self-serving uselessness, and how it is “little more than social work tinged with messianic delusions.” Get rid of it.

The real traitors and criminals are those with the powers of the State who criminally violate the people’s property and liberty. Those are the real “subversives.” This goes back to Gary Gibson’s article above. When the people forfeit their rights to establish their own means of self-defense and security, and allow the State to usurp such tasks, the State will use such powers to serve its own hunger for power and control. Those who are most desirous of power and control over others are those who are most attracted to this line of work, this kind of power monopoly. They are the subversive ones.